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How Level Is That Playing Field?

Catalyzing

April 16, 2013 — In light of yesterday’s events at the 117th running of the Boston Marathon, our hearts and thoughts at Catalyst go out to those spectators and runners impacted by this horrible tragedy. I have run this marathon three times, and I have been struggling to make sense of this event.

I won a 24-hour race last November by running 104.87 miles in 24 hours.

Wait, scratch that. I was the number one woman. I came in second overall. I don’t have the privilege of saying, “I won.” Even though I placed first in the women’s division, the only person who ran more mileage than me, a man, was the big winner.

The average salaries of head coaches at NCAA Division I-A for women’s teams are $932,700 less than the average salaries of head coaches at NCAA Division I-A men’s teams.

The total prize money awarded by the LPGA is five times less than that awarded by the PGA.

In 2005, WNBA players were paid a minimum of $31,200 (versus $385,277 for NBA players) and a maximum of $89,000 (versus over $15 million). Their total team salaries were capped at $673,000 (versus $46 million for NBA teams).

Do these gaps persist because women are still considered “the weaker sex?” We now know enough about biology to realize that if a woman runs a marathon, her uterus won’t fall out. But even today, men athletes are “legends” and women athletes are “ladies.”

Women make tough athletes, and we should be afforded equal opportunities to demonstrate our skills. We can play that extra set and run those extra 100 meters. I think raising standards for women in these small ways will help ensure that women get the respect they deserve in the sports world—and help close the gaps in salary and opportunities.

So how can we help make this happen?

First off, I would urge you to support women in sports—watch a women’s game, live or on TV. Encourage your daughters, nieces, and friends to get involved with sports. Demand equal pay and equal treatment for all athletes.

Because men and women are built differently, I don’t believe that women athletes should be measured directly against men. But that doesn’t mean we should be given fewer opportunities to play and/or paid less when we do.

Ultrarunning magazine listed 18 ultra-marathons which women won outright in 2011. That number will continue to climb as more and more women enter the world of ultra-marathons. As a serious runner and the director of the Black Rock City 50k, I hope that I will someday be as lauded for my achievements in my field as men are for their achievements in theirs.

13 Reader Comments

Aja Marshsays:

4/16/2013 05:02:42

nice article! my dad was really big on levelling the playing field in sports when i was growing up (i was one of 2 girls on my first place winning t-ball team; at our school field day my dad argued equality in the basketball toss-- boys threw into real hoops, girls threw into trash cans), and he never really encouraged gender-specific thinking as a means to limitation to do anything. (thanks dad!) and in high school track, even though i wasn't one of the fastest on the team, my (female) coach often singled me out to train with the guy's team-- maybe because i tried so hard to just be my best and she wanted to give me a different kind of challenge? and i still get a buzz every time i pass a guy while i'm out on a run or in a race, because hey, I CAN.

You won the race. While it's good to think men and women are equal, we are not when it comes to sport performances. And a couple of outright wins of women in ultra races don't change that. They are just the exception of the rule.
To stay with the ultramarathon example. I think women could do very well in multi day races because they can pace themselfs better than men. But also here are limits.
1. Social Time away from Family
2. Body size.
Dipali Cunningham from Australia won the 6 Day race ( that means 6 days of more or less non stop running) several times I believe outright before men and she holds the world record of 513 miles. But this is 126 miles less than the men's record of 639 miles from Yannis Kouros. If nothing else longer legs make for longer steps.

I truly believe that we should treat men and women the same, but I think there are limits and we also have to acknowledge them.

In ANY sanctioned running competition, whether national or international, it IS
considered two separate races being run concurrently. It is in the rules...
Now if someone wants to put on a non-sanctioned race (Laz's Backyard Ultra as
an example) they are more than welcome to do it. But unless the RD specifically
dictates otherwise any race should follow suit.
John

I don't think imposing civic, social, or athletic limitations on any group
or class of people is right.

I think that acknowledging and accommodating real and demonstrably
significant differences between groups without simultaneously imposing any
of those above limitations is absolutely OK. In fact, I think a just and
equitable society requires it.

I run with runners, both male and female, who are better runners than I
am. I do it for the reasons you list... they help me become a better
runner. And again, at a certain level, the difference between a
woman besting a particular male peer of the same age might be due to
training commitment more so than respective sex differences. Nonetheless,
a woman, in general, is going to have to work harder than an "equivalent"
male to acquire and maintain the same level.

The issue with tennis is that women tennis players CAN play five sets and so by being limited to just 3 at the Grand Slams (started back in the day when women were thought of as too delicate) it plays into the hand of opponents of equal pay. Women are not being allowed to do "equal work" and therefore are penalized by less prize money. For top athletes, this is unusually sexist. In addition, not only would five sets make sure the better player wins with no weird upsets, it is more grueling and would make the women's game more interesting to watch since pure baseline hitting would be too exhausting to win. With the Williams sisters careers beginning to fade, we need dynamic women with full games to return interest to women's tennis. Five sets would allow new players with some of the game skills the men are now using to rise to the top.

I disagree with the notion there shouldn't be separate races. Why? I'll tell you why. The 'average woman' has to work MUCH harder than the 'average man' to reach the same level of physical ability using current standards of measure (which are based on the average male's ability). That is a fact of biology. As a man, I would probably die if I had to birth a child and all the training in the world wouldn't change that.

In running races I get chicked all the time, but am not blind as to what goes on at the front of the pack. Elite men have quite a gap on the elite women. Sure there are women who can (and should) compete head to head with their male counterparts, but they are outliers.

So when I hear that there should be only one race, on set of requirements for firefighters, infantry men, etc. what I hear is that we are willing to limit the participation of women to the subset that can meet the male standard. If that is allowed to continue I would expect women to be able to compete on par with men in after about 20,000 more years of evolution. How the hell is that fair?

If I had a 125 lb son I'm not going to tell him he is going to bench 350 lbs if he only tries harder. Granted, he might, but not likely. So I am not going to expect that from my 125 lb daughter. If she want's to do it I'm going to back her to the hilt, but I'm not going harbor illusions.

For jobs requiring a certain physical standard, like infantry and fire fighting, the problem is that until recently women didn't do those jobs - only men did. So the tasks were designed with that constraint - the US government issued 'male, 1 each'. Is that the only way to do those jobs? Of course not. The tasks can be redesigned so that they can be performed using a mix of average males and average females. At the scene of a fire, not all persons need to be able to carry hoses and not all people need to be able to carry out survivors - as long as the labor input mix is adequate and the tasks are property designed the job will get done. It's just easier to keep doing the things the way they have always been done - isn't it?

For certain military jobs, the exclusion of women were based on artificial limits. Take flying, for example. Aside from combat, flying jet fighters was and is considered hard, physical labor. But examined closely, the hard physical part is the ability of the pilot to tolerate high-g forces. The rest consists of sitting on your ass and being able to move a control stick that in today's world is controlled by a computer - bottom line, doesn't take much strength to move the control.

When women started flying high performance military aircraft, it was observed that women have a physical advantage over their male counterparts with respect to g-tolerance. The average distance between their hearts and their brains is shorter than the average man - so the heart has to work a little less to keep the brain pro-fused during high g-maneuvers. Today there are many capable women flying fighter aircraft.

In professional sports there will always be women who can (and should) toe the line with the guys - but to eliminate women's races does nothing but insure only the outliers will be competitive. Outside of sports job requirements need to be re-designed to match a human resource pool consisting of both sexes. We always have based physical labor requirements on the average male, but that's not the way nature works. For example, consider an ant colony. The workers/soldiers/etc. are females. When they need males, the make them. Outside of reproduction the jobs to maintain the colony are designed for the average female.

The root problem is that for most of human history women have been treated by society not as contributing resources but as the property of men. Modern societies still struggle with this. Some societies don't even try and treat their women little better than livestock. I like to think we do better, yet women in America are still paid less than men for the same work and their bodies are considered fair game for regulation (see how far a law to make wasting sperm illegal gets in the congress). Why? Men make the rules and are reluctant to give up that power so what we have is much lip service and politically correct talk, without substantial change. Things are changing, but they could be changing faster.

Life is not fair, but telling a woman that all she has to do is work harder to beat a male competitor is just us guys telling women that you can compete but it has to be on our (male) terms. Sorry, I don't buy that.

I love the opportunity to challenge myself in situations like trail running races, where men and women while not competing against one another are running side by side. As I continue to race, I'll continue to push myself, to aim to win (regardless of whether it's possible), and maybe one day I'll even win outright. But muscular developmental capacity isn't a mental thing I can champion. For instance if I were an elite female weightlifter, no matter how hard I work I'm not going to be able to out-compete a biologically male person in an elite weightlifting competition. Homogenizing difference is silly at best, and futilely oppressive at worst. Separate races don't mean we're weaker, and they certainly don't mean when we win we aren't truly winners. Equality does not mean justice (see image http://ctworkingmoms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/equality-vs-justice.jpg) Diversity in every respect should be acknowledged, respected, and celebrated.

That said, I am embarrassed of how unaware I was, until now, of the subtle ways women are shortchanged outside of the ultra world, even in separate leagues. No way should women be running 200m less, playing 3 instead of 5 rounds, when we are competing on a level playing field with other women! I want to take on the same courses, the same distances, the same number of rounds as the men, AND I want to do so competing against my fellow feisty female athletes.
You definitely won, Cherie. Keep rockin' those trails!

Men play best-of-five at the four major (grand slam) tournaments but only best-of-three the rest of the time (and in college etc; in fact only a single 8-game set for college doubles). Women pros play best-of-three all the time, although there have been best-of-five women's matches in the past. This may have started originally because of concerns about physical differences, but I don't think that has anything to do with it now. Which is not to say that it's a trivial feat to play five hard sets of tennis over many hours: conditioning plays a huge role at that point. But presumably the women could get into sufficient shape if need be, as the better men have.

There are definitely a lot of fans (and perhaps some female players), male and female, who would like to see best-of-five at the women's majors, and I'm not sure any one organization (media or otherwise) is making a conscious decision against it, but I suspect it is driven by tv. Best-of-five is hard for tv, because it can take a long time and is very unpredictable (everyone knows how long a football or basketball game will last, or a marathon, or a round of golf; baseball is less predictable but still much more so than tennis). I think they would have to be persuaded that there is extremely strong demand to see longer women's matches before they would switch, and in fact I suspect they would like the men to go back to three except that everyone would be too annoyed about it.
****
Now to respond in part to Amelia above: women earn the same as men at the grand slams, despite playing much less. This was a controversial change some years ago, and i have heard some women say they think it is unfair as is, because of the difference in effort -- but of course they (legitimately) want to change it so that women are allowed to play five, not to change the prize money. Other women's tournaments often pay less, but those are not held together with a men's tournament (and in any case the men only play best-of-three on those one anyway), so again the rules aren't what determines the pay.

First I want to personally thank Cheryl for continuing to post on this topic. Cheryl is awesome to be around and my family is better off for having the opportunity to have spent time with her.

I am the RD of the referenced November event, Croatan 24. I cannot take away from her argument she didn’t win overall, but she didn’t. I would like to point out that the men’s and women’s races were in-fact treated as two different events. We recognized top 3 men and the top 3 women by award in a ceremony immediately following the race and recognized them as men’s 1st – 3rd and women’s 1st - 3rd. The awards were also identical for 1st, 2nd & 3rd. There was no value difference.

We’ve treated the awards and races separately at all of our events and have always noted who the OA winner was. At GY100 that was Brenda Carawan (F) in 2012. And you’ll notice she was crowned OA, same as Nunez (M) was OA this year. But there was also a champions award for the opposite gender not taking the overall title as well. And they were recognized again with a champions award of equal value.

I did make a mistake though last year when Cheryl won for the ladies at Croatan. Originally I only had a course record for the guys, a total failure on my part. Cheryl brought it to my attention that she had effectively been robbed of the ladies course record. Honestly I felt like a tool, she was completely right and I agreed and promptly corrected it.

My experience is that most races do treat them as two different races, but when you look at how most ultra’s post results what you see is the OA results. In most triathlons results are posted in 3 formats. Men’s, women’s and overall. The major difference is most tri’s will have several thousand participants to the typical couple hundred for an ultra.

So I guess the issue here is one of recognition by way of looking at results reporting. Even though we’re recognizing separate awards at the race we’re typically reporting overall results only. The question then becomes should we be reporting results in multiple formats like they do in tri instead of just overall?

If you win overall for the ladies and there are 5 dudes in front of you in the overall results does it diminish your place as first overall for the ladies? Does it make your effort worth less?

To me it doesn’t change it at all. We had a very small, very low-key 24-hour track run. A male came up from Florida and ran through the hurricane winds and outlasted everyone, he won overall, by something like 60-miles. My 13 yo daughter won for the ladies because she outlasted the ladies and ran through the storm when the other 1 or 2 ladies packed it in. She won with something like 16-miles in an ultra, very low miles. Did it diminish her win for the ladies? NO, she was the best girl that day. She outlasted all the other ladies in the storm, but he still got her can royally kicked by the male winner. She wasn’t less proud of her accomplishment and neither were we.

When all the girls left she asked "how many laps do I need to run to win the girls race"? Clearly she wasn't worried about who else was running. To my daughter it was a girls race period.

As an RD of mixed gender races, and Dad to boys & girls it does give me something to think about. Should we be posting more than just overall results?

Thanks Cheryl for continuing to post, keeping this topic fresh and challenging us as RD’s and events to consider how we’re running events, giving awards and reporting results.

I wonder just how big the gender gap is in high school sports. When you look at the statistics given by the NFHS, three possible reasons for the difference in high school athletic participation rates between males and females become apparent. The difference could be because football gives males a large number of opportunities that cannot be easily made up in female sports. There simply is no female sport that equals football in terms of number of athletes. The second reason could be because there is a a greater overall demand for sports from males. When you compare team size for similar sports (XC, baseball/softball, basketball, etc.) you will find that men participate in greater numbers than women. There are some sports in which females outnumber males (Tennis, volleyball and swimming for example) but there are still more sports where men outnumber women. The last question I have with the statistics is do they count an athlete that plays multiple sports as 1 athlete or do they count them each time they play a sport?
Looking over the high school participation stats, 1.28million more males then females participated in a high school sport during 2011-2012. If you take out football, that number drops to 163K more males then females. With football, males make up 58% of all high school athletes, without football, they only make up 51% of all high school athletes. With the average football team roster of 77 athletes, is there even enough demand from females to make up the difference? Looking at current participation rates of males vs. females, I would argue no, there is not enough female demand to make up the difference.
Part of the reason is because women don’t participate in as high of numbers as men. There are 8,700 more teams for men than women and, on average, there are 7.2 more males then females on a team. Again, the reason for the difference in the number of teams is because of football. Take out football and women now have 6,050 more teams then men, but still average 2.2 fewer athletes per team than men. If you compare the average team size for the 8 largest sports that men and women share, men average 3 more athletes per team then women. Many of these teams are in sports where adding additional athletes would be very easy and of little cost to the team. For example, cross country averages 2.4 more males per team, track averages 6.5, golf averages 3.9 and baseball averages 3.9 more players than softball. I doubt that there are 2.4 fewer women than men on high school cross country teams because the opportunity is not available for women. The opportunity is there, but are women taking advantage of it? There are some sports where females outnumber males, but there are not enough to overcome the differences in the larger sports. For example, in tennis, volleyball and swimming, those teams average 1.7, 4.2 and 3.1 more females than males, respectively.

Perhaps the best way to reduce the gender gap in sports is to increase participation among females. Maybe the lack of opportunity is partly responsible for the gap, but I would argue that the participation rate among females is just a much, if not more, to blame. It is true that in most sports, there are more male teams than female teams, but what would the numbers look like if women had an identical number of teams in sports where male teams currently outnumber female teams? Lets take a look. Assuming male and female participation rates stayed the same (and women kept their number advantages in sports like tennis and swimming), but had the same number of opportunities in male dominated sports like cross country and golf, you would only add about 130K females to high school sports rosters. Men would still have about 300 more teams then females (due to football), but would males would still outnumber females by almost 1.5 million athletes. If you take out football, males would still outnumber females by 31,000 athletes, despite women now having almost 14,500 more teams then males.
As for differences in requirements for males and females, I agree with you in that I don’t think there should be any. If a male has to run a 5K for XC, then so should a female. In my state, XC and track is the same for both males and females.
Also, I agree that we should encourage more females to take up athletics. In doing so, you would increase the participation rate, which would create more demand for female sports, which could in turn increase the number of opportunities for females. I think that is the best way to reduce the gender gap among high school athletes.

Here is a great source of stats abt Title IX and high school athletics:
http://www.nwlc.org/resource/battle-gender-equity-athletics-elementary-and-secondary-schools

I think another thing that would encourage more girls to join sports is how they are messaged, and how they are treated. Why do you want to do something where you are treated like a second class citizen? I actually joined track NOT lacrosse b/c I was told we were we'd have to wear the boy's old lacrosse uniforms and play on the crappy, really far fields behind the elementary school. Sometimes, when the situation shows you won't even get a sliver of equality, that you won't even get a shot before you start - it's hard to want to start.

I remember also my high school putting SO much emphasis on football. We had one of the worst football teams ever. Meanwhile, other teams, like our girls' soccer was amazing...but they didn't get a smidgen of the funding football did, or the recognition. Sadly, what I'm saying is not uncommon - I've heard it a lot before. Here are some more myths: http://www.nwlc.org/resource/debunking-myths-about-title-ix-and-athletics

This whole discussion reminds me of how irritated I was when reading all of the comments on the Ultralist about this year's (or would it be considered "last year's") Across the Years 72 Hour. Joe Fejes broke the men's record and Vikena Yutz broke the women's record. Everybody seemed to be falling all over themselves to praise Joe's accomplishment (including Ultrarunning Magazine) but I heard hardly a word about Kena. In my opinion, Kena's achievement was every bit as amazing as Joe's ... more so to me, since I know how hard Kena worked to be able to run 254 miles (compared to the 204 she ran the year before). I also think the women's race was a much better "story". Only 3.1 miles separated the top two women. But again, even in the reports of the race, Kena's record setting performance and the exciting finish in the "women's race" was mentioned only in passing.

I would have loved to have been there to watch Kena and Charlotte Vasarhelyi battle it out. THAT's sports drama worth paying to see. As for Joe's record, I love ya Joe, but I'm happy just to have read about it.

As I've said before, when asked which men I look up to in the ultrarunning community, my answer is always "all the men I look up to are women".

http://e-phemera.livejournal.com/590923.html I'm offering a link to a personal journal entry, the catalyst for which came from this blog and the subsequent related thread appearing on the ULTRA mailing list; it kicked up my memories. Although not directly related to this first topic of women in long distance races, the events and tragic outcome of what happened at the Boston Marathon kicked me in the gut and added to my reflections about sports, identity as a runner, and the meaning of it all.